Dayforce CPO Amy Cappellanti-Wolf wants employees to ‘drink our own champagne’

Amy Cappellanti-Wolf has spent her entire career in HR, but said she’s “never seen such a shift in workforce dynamics, and the employer–employee relationship.” This recent evolution in the world of work, driven by factors such as a shift to remote and hybrid environments, as well as an increasing desire among employees for more flexibility, has made it a particularly interesting time to run people operations at Dayforce, Cappellanti-Wolf told HR Brew.

Cappellanti-Wolf, who was appointed as chief people officer (CPO) of the HR software company in late April, said she spent her first 100 days on the job getting to know Dayforce’s employee population, as well as familiarizing herself with the product suite. While Dayforce is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s a remote-first company, and, according to its 2023 annual report, half of its 9,000+ employees are based outside the US. Over the last few months, she’s done meet and greets with employees spanning from the Philippines to Chicago, part of an effort to “get to know the culture of the place.”

Customers come first. The Dayforce CPO said she’s been leaning not only into her role as head of HR, but also as “customer zero” for the company’s products. Running HR at a company that makes products for HR pros offers a seemingly unique opportunity to leaders like Cappellanti-Wolf, as they’re in a position to advise the firm on product strategy.

“I get a chance not only to be the head of HR, but also customer zero, and also in the roadmap, and be in front of customers,” she said. This hasn’t been the case everywhere Cappellanti-Wolf has worked, she noted. “Sometimes, when you’re in HR, you’re off to the side…and here I can actually inform it,” she said of Dayforce’s product roadmap, which includes features to help HR pros manage areas such as compliance, recruiting, and scheduling.

As part of this collaboration, Cappellanti-Wolf said she’s been working with the product team to get “clarity around when you want to involve the HR organization in terms of our input,” she said. In some markets, Dayforce is “selling to people like myself,” i.e. HR leaders, she explained. “So the idea here is just, how do we continue to give them those insights about what we would need as a business that you might want to sell to, and then also making certain there’s adoption?”

Drinking the Dayforce champagne. Cappellanti-Wolf said she wants to encourage Dayforce’s entire staff to use the company’s products—akin to drinking their own champagne—rather than just the HR team. “Everybody should be drinking it, versus [only] different parts of the organization,” she said.

One of Cappellanti-Wolf’s first big projects is building out a “shared services center,” a one-stop shop where employees can go to get all of their HR questions answered. She said her team is using Co-Pilot, a suite of AI-powered Dayforce features launched last fall, to help build the center. Her hope is that the tool can help HR pros save time they might have otherwise spent answering common inquiries.

“As we get more sophisticated in some of the questions that come in, the tool gets smarter and smarter, because it helps build upon that knowledge,” she said. “Without that, you’re sucking up a lot of people's time answering questions that maybe many people have.”